The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities, with a New Introduction

by Frank Donoghue

Book Overview

"What makes the modern university different from any other corporation?" asked Columbia's Andrew Delbanco recently in the New York Times. "There is more and more reason to think: less and less," he answered.

In this provocative book, Frank Donoghue shows how this growing corporate culture of higher education threatens its most fundamental values by erasing one of its defining features: the tenured professor.

Taking a clear-eyed look at American higher education over the last twenty years, Donoghue outlines a web of forces--social, political, and institutional--dismantling the professoriate. Today, fewer than 30 percent of college and university teachers are tenured or on tenure tracks, and signs point to a future where professors will disappear. Why? What will universities look like without professors? Who will teach? Why should it matter?

The fate of the professor, Donoghue shows, has always been tied to that of the liberal arts --with the
humanities at its core. The rise to prominence of the American university has been defined by the strength of the humanities and by the central role of the autonomous, tenured professor who can be both scholar and teacher. Yet in today's market-driven, rank- and ratings-obsessed world of higher education, corporate logic prevails: faculties are to be managed for optimal efficiency, productivity, and competitive advantage; casual armies of adjuncts and graduate students now fill the demand for teachers.

Bypassing the distractions of the culture wars and other "crises," Donoghue sheds light on the structural changes in higher education--the rise of community colleges and for-profit universities, the frenzied pursuit of prestige everywhere, the brutally competitive realities facing new Ph.D.s --that threaten the survival of professors as we've known them.

There are no quick fixes in The Last Professors; rather, Donoghue offers his fellow teachers and scholars
an essential field guide to making their way in a world that no longer has room for their dreams.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0823228606
• ISBN13: 9780823228607
• Release Date: April 2008
• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Length: 172 Pages
• Weight: 0.71 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.1" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

A dark future, but is it inevitable?

Donoghue's subject is the corporatization of the university and the effects of that phenomenon on faculty in the humanities. The forecast is dark: we have moved past crisis to inevitability. The current situation will not be reversed. A few elite institutions will continue to offer education in the liberal arts (although even those institutions are now marked by careerist materialism). Utility and efficiency (as understood by the corporate world) will continue to expand their rule; for-profit education will increase its already dramatic market share; adjuncts will continue to replace tenure-track faculty (particularly in the humanities) and academic life as we fondly remember it will never return. "Fondly" is meant in the 18th-century sense. Our memories may be sweet and loving but they are essentially delusional. "Fond" means "foolish" in the 18th century. We are delusional because the corporate attacks on the liberal arts (and particularly on the arts and humanities) are deeply rooted in our history and were already formidable in the late 19th century. The principal foci of Donoghue's argument are, in his words, the hyperprofessionalization of academic careers, the rapid erosion of tenure, the rise of for-profit higher education and the prestige race. He makes a strong, if dispiriting case for the future of the humanities. The degree to which he will be proven correct will turn on the ability of academic humanists to alter their current practices. For example, he notes, as many others have, that academic monographs now sell approximately 250 copies, where they once sold 1000. Actually, many sold more copies than that as recently as the early 1970's. There are many reasons for this: the erosion or removal of university press subsidies, the crowding of monograph budgets by serials budgets (particularly serials published by for-profit corporations), the reduction of library acquisition budgets (and, one should add, the eclipse of library budgets by information technology budgets). The problem also results, however, from the expansion of the humanities. Where English departments once offered approximately 10 specialty areas they now offer approximately 30. When the discipline becomes fragmented it becomes impossible for university presses to develop the number of lists commensurate with that number of `fields'. If the departments recalibrated and reconstituted themselves there would be a larger number of potential consumers per field and university presses could sell more books and lower their prices rather than pitch their prices exclusively to (shrinking) library budgets. What I am saying is that steps could be taken to ameliorate the current condition. Whether they will or not will depend on the degree of desperation which faculty finally confront (or are forced to confront). The book is excellent in its facts, its details, its lucidity and in the coherence of its core arguments. It does not, however, address other possible

Careers in Vocational Humanities Revisited

Since the book came out, way back in late 2008, our financial system has crumbled, GM has gone bankrupt, one out of five Americans is out of work, retailers and restaurants have closed, millions of homes have gone into foreclosure, and half the class of '09 is still unemployed. Having lived through that, you probably can handle bad news from the tenure front without your hair standing on end. Nonetheless, if you're really concerned about the Crisis in Higher Education, Donoghue puts that worry right to bed. A crisis, he explains, is a sudden event that calls for a dramatic, immediate response, whereas the American academic collapse began over 100 years ago. There can be no quick fix now, and the author has no hope the humanities can survive in the new corporate university. Anyone looking at this review probably isn't fooled by what's going on at the graduate-level in liberal arts departments, but if you're still considering Ivory Tower employment, it's a good idea to read this book, digest the facts and numbers, and see them assembled by someone who knows first-hand what he's talking about. No surprise that lots of humanities doctoral candidates drop out before taking a Ph.D. No surprise either that the dropouts are often the smartest, have the best undergraduate records and the highest GRE scores. The industrialization of education has been brutal, and Donoghue is surely right in predicting it's only going to get worse. As far back as forever, the functionally illiterate have held book-learning to be detrimental to making a living, and the succinct humanist reply remains always unintelligible to chuckleheads. As Donoghue points out, for the humanities to survive at a scholarly level there needs to be a steady supply of Ph.D. candidates for tenured faculty to teach, and if no tenure-track jobs are waiting at graduation, the student pool will evaporate, humanities departments will have to close up shop, and even well-published professors could perish. But wait a minute, can the health of any art, liberal or otherwise, be measured by the number of grad students it sustains? And the irony, of course, is this argument sees graduate school as essentially vocational. It trains for professorships. Still, for anyone considering a career in the cruel humanities, this a book to read, especially if the goal is a snug berth in academia. Don't let it dissuade you, but before you set out you want to know exactly what you're heading into.

Oh, the Humanities!

Higher education commentators have pointed to budget cuts, waning student interest, and dwindling tenure-track positions as evidence of a crisis in the liberal arts and humanities. Donoghue argues that the situation is worse than a crisis. His hard-hitting book examines how a decades-long economic squeeze and the growing influence of corporate culture have adversely affected higher education, threatening to drive the traditional professor extinct. Donoghue traces the current dilemma to the late 19th century, when the corporate values of efficiency and "usefulness" (in the most narrowly practical sense of the word) gained considerable influence in education. A corporate disdain for the humanities is exemplified by quotes from Andrew Carnegie and Richard Teller Crane. Carnegie advised colleges to imitate "a good manufacturer," and Crane famously asserted that no man who has "a taste for literature has the right to be happy" because "the only men entitled to happiness in this world are those who are useful." Beginning in the 1970s, the resurgence of a profit-and-efficiency driven ideology has lent new popularity to these sentiments. One of the key threats to the professoriate is the replacement of the full-time tenured professor with the easily exploitable and economically expedient part-time adjunct. Currently, fewer than 30 percent of college and university faculty are tenured or on tenure tracks, and the number is decreasing. Adjuncts often commute between institutions while facing meager pay and no job security. Taking into account her commute, one adjunct converted her salary into an hourly wage of $2.12, without benefits. This is just one piece of a larger puzzle in which higher education is increasingly focused on efficiency and the bottom line. A number of converging forces have led to an escalation in the competitiveness and pressure placed upon graduate students and untenured professors. Following the business model, institutions pressure faculty to increase their productivity, which is measured by the frequency of publication. The desperate career situation has fueled escalating pressures to publish early and often, yet as university presses and libraries struggle, the market for academic monographs has shrunk. Donoghue draws attention to the plight of humanities grad students, whose numbers far exceed the academic positions available to them upon completion. Eager for the cheap labor they provide, institutions gladly take them on and often paint an overly rosy picture of their future prospects. Many end up spending a good part of a decade accumulating enormous debt, only to enter the job market late with little hope of obtaining the job they trained for. He also discusses the growing popularity of for-profit, online-driven colleges, which candidly refer to students as "consumers"--an approach that has caught on outside the for-profit sphere. While many institutions must compete with the for-profits by emulating their "jobs, job

Great Book! Would be informative for those outside academia!

Good Book! Would be especially great for those outside academia who are ignorant on the history of the university and professoriate.

The days of the tenured professor are looking grim as the world changes too fast

Today's world is full of corporations where engineering and business sense are the top values in employees. Higher Education, as such, has turned to teaching these aspects. "The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities" is a look at the victims of this turn, the college professors. With the fall of the liberal arts and modern emphasis on efficiency, the days of the tenured professor are looking grim as the world changes too fast for a long term career as a college level instructor to be a viable option. "The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities" is a scholarly examination of a serious academic shift, highly recommended for community and college library social issues collections.